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| Europe |
| Germany: The "new" Left Party |
| 2005-07-17 |
| Germany's reform communist PDS party voted overwhelmingly in favour of joining forces with a new far-left party on Sunday and agreed to change their name to The Left Party for a general election in September. The party, which pollsters forecast could win 12 percent of the vote, has the backing of about 30 percent in the formerly communist east and has moved ahead of the Christian Democrats as the most popular party in the region. Delegates to an extraordinary PDS party congress in Berlin on Sunday supported the measure by 74.6 percent to easily clear a two-thirds majority requirement. Members of the WASG party, a splinter far-left party led by former Social Democrat (SPD) chairman Oskar Lafontaine and based in western Germany, agreed last week by an 82 percent majority to the name change and merger of campaign efforts. The Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS), successors to Erich Honecker's SED party that built the Berlin Wall and ruled Communist East Germany until its demise in 1989, has remained a political force in Germany's five eastern states. "This is an extremely important chance for us," said Gregor Gysi, the charismatic leader of the PDS. "Who would have thought in 1990 that we would be part of a pan-German party that is left of the SPD? I have to admit I couldn't have imagined it." The left-wing party wants to raise taxes on the rich and expand social services for low-wage earners. Gysi, who was economy minister in the Berlin city government before quitting politics for a year after suffering a heart attack and undergoing brain surgery, said the new left party could have a major influence on German politics. "I didn't know in 1990 how long the PDS would last," said Gysi. "This is a great triumph for us and I just hope we don't cock the whole thing up." A colourful mixture of die-hard Marxists, punks, unemployed and the so-called "losers of German unification", the PDS is junior coalition partners in Berlin's city government as well as in the northeastern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. But the PDS had been struggling in recent years, failing to make in-roads into the populous west because of its links to the former East German communists and ending up short of the five-percent threshold needed for seats in parliament in 2002 after clearing that hurdle in 1998. In western Germany, a group of far-left rebels in Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's SPD split from the party out of frustration with its drift to the centre and formed the WASG last year. As they were unlikely to clear the five percent hurdle on their own, WASG leader Lafontaine and Gysi agreed last month to bring their parties together -- despite some initial hesitation among party members on both sides. "There's a change in culture and this will expand our horizons," Gysi said. "That's what we want even if we are all a little bit fearful at the same time." |
| Posted by:.com |
| #2 Does "far-left" in europe mean the same as far left here? If so I think Germany is sunk. They would be better off keeping Scrotumger. |
| Posted by: bigjim-ky 2005-07-17 23:15 |
| #1 Oh, Boy. Repackaged marxists and assorted odds and ends. And I thought the greens represented the (freakshow) Left end of the spectrum. Fred, is this worth a surprise or apathy meter? |
| Posted by: N guard 2005-07-17 15:45 |